Why Black British History is Important To Me: Will Poulter
‘Do the best you can until you know better. Then when you know better, do better’, Maya Angelou.
It wasn’t until after I left school that I had a black history lesson that did not make slavery and oppression its primary focus.
That is no one’s fault but my own. But, perhaps at the highest level, it also lies with the policymakers in government who have not done enough to include the historical experiences of black people, and people of colour in our national curriculum. Consequently, many people, such as myself, have developed a vague and inaccurate impression of what black history is. By extension, many of the contributions made by black people over time have been overlooked. This has resulted in many white people developing problematic ideas about black people, misconceptions and harmful stereotypes of the black experience.
The current education system favours Eurocentric narratives that contribute to a false idea of white superiority and help to uphold white supremacy. I believe that the decision to educate in this way is perhaps the biggest enemy to progress in the fight against systemic racism and to efforts of cultivating an anti-racist future. If we accept the fact that racism is something that’s taught, what are we doing in the design of our education system to change that?
If we want to do better, we must learn better.
In the short time I have been a collaborator with the Black Curriculum, I have been educated on the importance of addressing this issue. And, also on how embedding black history into the national curriculum is essential to every young person feeling included and represented. Both by our education system and in broader society.
My Experience Of Learning Black History
Being white, I have an unearned privilege and have protection from the prejudice that is a part of reality for black people and people of colour. That is to say, my whiteness has made me ignorant to the multifaceted effects of racism and the issue of white privilege; unburdened by ever having to think about how my skin colour might have any sort of bearing on my experience. It should have been mandatory to learn about racism and privilege in far greater detail than I did. Concurrently, the history of Black, Indigenous, People of Colour (BIPOC) should have been better represented for the many achievements, contributions and progressions that it can be characterised by, and not solely taught in relation to the subject of race.
Instead, I learned a version of history that made me dangerously unaware of my privilege, ignorant to the truth about Britain’s relationship to the rest of the world, and insensitive to the complex lived experiences of BIPOC.
My experience won’t be the same as everyone else’s. For context, I went to a private school in London, in which the vast majority of students were white. As a result, conversations about race were limited and rarely well informed. However, I imagine a great many people who went to school in the UK, who are also white, will relate to the experience of being taught very little about black history in the classroom (even less about black British history). Anything else that they may have learned will have probably been discovered outside of their standard history syllabus.
I am hesitant, in the context of a letter that aims to underscore my support of The Black Curriculum’s work, to insert my own experience into the narrative at all. White centring and eurocentricity are some of the very issues challenged by The Black Curriculum. They suggest a fairer and more accurate approach to how we record and recall our history. However, I can’t honestly explain how I arrived at their door without detailing what I would regard as my first real lesson in black history. Nor, without being frank about the position of ignorance that I approached the subject from.
Encountering A Deeper Introduction To Race And History
I was 23 when I had my first real black history lesson. I should caveat the following by pointing out that, as was the case when I was in school, I was learning about black history through a prism of oppression, inequality, injustice and pain. The focus was on the issue of racism in America. For this reason, it was far from a complete lesson on black history. However, it was unflinching and honest in a way that I had not experienced as a student. There was no agenda here other than to be as open and detailed as possible in the retelling of facts.
In preparation for the film Detroit (2017), where I played a racist police officer, I was lucky enough to sit down with Ziza Delgado, who earned her PhD and M.A. in Ethnic Studies from the University of California, at Berkeley. Our meeting was organised by the production team, to inform me about the socio-historical context of the real-life events the film was centred on. Ziza taught me about how in the early 20th century and as part of the ‘Great Migration’, black people fleeing America’s southern states attempted to settle in the north of the country. They fled to cities like Detroit, hoping to receive fairer treatment and gain access to equal opportunities. Under Jim Crow laws and various policies that enforced racial segregation (including the process of ‘Redlining’, which heavily restricted areas of the city where a black person could purchase a home), it became incredibly difficult for black communities to establish a safe and sustainable future.
This widespread systemic injustice, paired with continual mistreatment from white people and racially motivated police violence, forced a rebellion. The black community in Detroit rose up over five days to protest, in July 1967. The film is set over these five days, telling the story of the Algiers Motel incident in which three innocent, unarmed black men; Carl Cooper (17), Aubrey Pollard (19) and Fred Temple (18), were killed by the police during a raid in a motel where they were guests. The film’s release marked the 50th anniversary of the rebellion and the men’s deaths.
Almost 50 years after the events, I was learning about this for the first time. I was learning about the death of these men as a result of racially motivated police violence. What’s more, I was learning about this in 2016, the same year that black men aged between 15-34 were nine times more likely to be killed by police officers than any other American. The same year that Alton Sterling and Philando Castile had been killed by police officers, sparking protests and rebellions across the country. And, also the same year that the number of black people and people of colour in the UK that had died in police custody, where police had used forceful restraint, exceeded 1,500. This was a death rate 2 times greater than for other groups. It was impossible to ignore just how fatal a link there was between my own miseducation and the deaths of these innocent black people.
How had my lack of knowledge contributed to my position as a bystander? How was I not aware of how much less likely I was to die at the hands of the police? Why hadn’t I contended with the idea of my skin as a form of protection from harm? Why hadn’t I empathised with the idea that someone else’s skin colour could be perceived as a weapon by figures of authority? What other racist ideas do I have, that might have gone unchallenged?
In studying the contributing factors that lead to this moment, I had an opportunity to take a far deeper and detailed look at a chapter in black history than I had ever been afforded at school. Across a handful of sessions, Ziza gave me an education on black history that was almost entirely absent from my experience as a student. As part of the process and where this intersected with the subject of slavery, she told me in detail about Britain’s participation in the transatlantic slave trade. I learned then, on the other side of the Atlantic to where I went to school, that Liverpool had been home to the biggest and most profitable port for slave trading in the country. Bristol had also been prolific in its participation of the transatlantic slave trade, where more than 500,000 enslaved African people were estimated to have been shipped to North America and the Caribbean.
I knew that slavery and oppression was not the complete history of black history and, of course, that the black community were not solely defined by the struggle for equality concerning these matters. However, why was this not reflected in the national curriculum? For the first time, I was adequately confronting the reality of these things as a feature of history that continues to affect the lived experience of black people today in a myriad of ways. It was not a distant moment in (just) America’s past that has ceased to have any relevance. For the first time, slavery had been reframed and re-taught as an indelible mark on black history; a subject I had only just begun to learn.
Needless to say, while I was at school, Black British history barely featured as a part of the curriculum. Anything I knew about black history had seemingly been designed to present America as the only country with an issue of racism. The only place where black people had made any sort of historically noteworthy contribution to society. This led me to reckon with a host of critical questions. Chief among them was this; why had so much Black history been omitted in favour of the things I did end up learning?
Our Curriculum’s Inadequate Depiction Of Historical Events
The history of Britain and its empire, as it is taught, fails to acknowledge the enormous brutality it could be defined by, in favour of its achievements in supposedly bringing democracy, infrastructure and lawfulness to various parts of the world. This dangerously biased look at British imperialism contributes to a myth about Britain’s mark on the world and the misplaced pride of many British people. As The Black Curriculum patron, Prof. David Olusoga once wrote for the Guardian, this pride speaks to ‘our collective amnesia about the man-made famines, slave trading and daily violence of our imperial past’. He questions, ‘…how can we ask people to take pride in, or feel regret about, a history that is hardly taught in schools and little-explored elsewhere?’.
In the debate over how much good was brought about through Britain’s colonial rule, versus how much bad, our education system leans heavily towards the former. The savagery and brutality that were ascribed to the actions of the Nordic Vikings were never reserved for any British soldier stepping foot on foreign soil. In the recounting of our history, we are master finger-pointers and keen fantasists.
The rhetoric of white supremacy is predicated on coupling colonial amnesia with fairy-tale versions of the real events and the figures implicated. Winston Churchill is mostly celebrated for leading Britain through World War II and ultimately the defeat of Nazi Germany by Britain and its allies. The image of Churchill as a fearless leader and a silver-tongued orator is well known. If you went to school in the UK, you can be forgiven for having an impression of Winston Churchill as the prime-minister who stemmed the threat that fascism posed to peaceful democracy in Britain, and a man who said some quick-witted things when drunk. This is a dangerously forgiving and incomplete image of a figure. Who, for many British people and communities around the world, was an avid perpetrator of the racism so many praise him for fighting against.
In East Africa, just a few years after the fall of Hitler came the Mau Mau uprising against British colonialism. The Mau Mau (otherwise known as The Kenya Land and Freedom Army) responded with armed rebellion against Churchill’s efforts to preserve land belonging to the Kikuyu people of Kenya, for the sake of white settlers. The famed British prime-minister called for the “blackamoors’’ to be evacuated and detained. Almost the entire Kikuyu population, approximately 1.5 million people, were held in concentration camps. Pulitzer prize-winning historian Caroline Erskine reported that “electric shock was widely used, as well as cigarettes and fire… the screening teams whipped, shot, burned, and mutilated Mau Mau suspects.” This resulted in the death of tens of thousands, possibly hundreds of thousands of Kikuyu people. By the end of the Mau Mau uprising in 1960, most of the British government files about this period had been destroyed. Along with it, much evidence of one of the bloodiest chapters of imperial violence in Britain’s history, in which Winston Churchill played a leading role.
What’s particularly disturbing about how history is taught in schools, is the tendency to pave over Britain’s humanitarian crimes against millions of people, with the suggestion that the colonisation of ‘less developed’ parts of the world was always mutually beneficial. This romanticised narrative of colonialism implies that in return for the natural resources Britain took from the countries it colonised, it brought socio-economic growth and stability. This is a misrepresentation that ignores the primacy of exploitation to Britain’s colonial rule and is born of several racist assumptions, along with myths about Britain and the countries it colonised.
Firstly, that every country's development can be determined according to white Britain’s metric for what it is to be ‘developed’. Secondly, that the implementation of white-western ideals and practices would be of benefit to every culture Britain penetrated. Thirdly, that British culture was the height of civilisation. Of course, those narratives fail to mention that countries across Africa and places like India would not have been invaded in the first place if they weren’t far richer in natural resources. With many on track to, or already, contributing to a much greater percentage of the world’s GDP than Britain at the time they were placed under rule. The truth of colonisation as a violent imposition on these countries and the lies about their socio-economic incapability without Britain’s involvement must be addressed in the education system. Mythology must not be allowed to cloud the world view of young people in this country for the sake of appeasing white guilt.
Historically speaking, the black community has been one of the worst affected by the potent combination of erasing facts from the education system and replacing them with mythology. The permutations of racist ideas founded in this mythology spread wide and deep across the fabric of our society. Just as crucial to identifying and debunking these mistruths, is the need to acknowledge the many contributions made by black people to society, over time. As a white, male, student, I saw people who looked like me reflected in just about every sector throughout history. It is entirely unjust and inexcusable for our syllabus to continue excluding BIPOC from the narrative, other than within the subject of slavery and oppression.
Supporting The Black Curriculum’s Quest For Change
By embracing The Black Curriculum’s proposal to reform our education system by embedding black history into the national curriculum, we could ensure that young people learn about black history across a wide and textured spectrum of subjects. Thanks to The Black Curriculum, I learned about the Windrush generation. The near half a million people who moved to Britain between 1948 and 1970, to participate in the post-war effort to rebuild the country. Against the tide of what was often a hostile reception from Britons at that time, many black men served in the army, with many black women helping to establish the NHS. The contributions of the Windrush generation were fundamental to Britain finding its feet after one of the most difficult periods in the country’s history and enriched our cultural landscape in numerous ways that we continue to benefit from today.
The sacrifices made by black soldiers such as Arthur Roberts and many other British soldiers of African and Caribbean descent were totally absent from the countless lessons I had about WW1. Arthur was a Scottish soldier, born in Glasgow. After surviving the war and serving as part of a battalion that suffered 200 fatalities during their time in France, he finally returned home to his job in the shipping yards as a marine engineer. Almost 20 years after his passing in 1985, Arthur’s diaries were discovered in an attic. His writings offer a moving and fascinating look at the life of a young soldier. The omission of Arthur’s story from commonly taught history is an unfortunate reflection of the lack of recognition Arthur and his fellow black soldiers received upon returning from battle. Sadly Arthur passed in 1982 without any formal acknowledgement of his contribution to the war effort.
The least that could be done to honour his memory and the legacy of soldiers like Arthur would be to tell their stories and ensure that black Britons are not continually excluded from these significant chapters in our history. And, what about the stories of heroines like Mary Seacole? The British-Jamaican nurse responsible for bravely setting up ‘The British Hotel’, which was a place of refuge for sick and wounded soldiers in the Crimean war (1853-1856). After her application to become a British army nurse was denied in 1854, she independently travelled to Crimea to help the British soldiers on the front-line, often using a combination of European, Jamaican and West African medical practices to treat the wounded. We should be including the stories of figures like ‘Mother Seacole’, as she became known, alongside the Florence Nightingales we know so well.
A survey conducted by Impact of Omission revealed that 86.2% of British people learned about the Tudors, while a mere 7.6% learnt about the British colonisation of Africa. Furthermore, in the many revisitations of the Tudor period, despite the fact figures like King Henry VIII are mentioned repeatedly, there is no mention of a single black person. The Black Curriculum has been educating young people about people like John Blanke; an incredibly popular musician of the Tudor period who is documented to have played at the funeral of the King that Henry VIII succeeded. John Blanke went on to hold a position as a paid and respected employee of the royal family. Stories such as John Blanke’s and those of other free African people in the UK, help dismantle the false notion that the presence of black people in Britain begins with the slave trade. Providing further evidence of the contributions black people have made to the artistic heritage of Britain.
The exclusion of black people from British history runs deep and wide. This is despite the evidence that has led anthropologists and historians alike to believe that the arrival of black and dark-skinned people in Europe and Britain, predates even the Roman empire. As well as the belief that the practices of their settlement were a key influence over the development of Roman culture. This hypothesis is supported by the latest advances in archaeological techniques.
Surely every young person, in the modern age, is owed the guarantee of an education that’s based in truth and total honesty. To do anything less is dangerous and corrupt. For young people to receive the education they deserve, the curriculum should be reformed as The Black Curriculum suggests; by making black history a compulsory element. For the communities of colour who continue to suffer the consequences of Britain’s colonial past, immense insult is added to grave injury by attempting to hide or distort the reality of white people’s history of racism. Consequently, only making it more likely for those mistakes to be repeated.
It’s a truly disturbing but unavoidable fact that what we learn of our history is not adequate for informing this generation about our past. Nor does it ensure that every student feels equally included in the construction of our future. The Black Curriculum’s plans, in their application, will help bring a more accurate sense of identity and belonging to every student. Thus, improving the opportunity for cohesion and understanding between the young people of this country. This progression of our education system has immense potential for much needed societal change.
I urge you to support their work, to make things better.